June 15, 20242 yr Hi, I'm removing 3, 8TB drives from my array. I know two ways to do this and I'm planning to take the dangerous approach but am thinking I have a method to reduce the risk, looking for process confirmation or better options Why go the dangerous route? I don't want to wait 3+ days for my 3 8TB drives to zero out. I also understand that my docker and vm services should be offline during these zero operations which means 3+ days of down time for the server. I'm guessing that as long as I know no services would write to these disks during the zero, I wouldn't actually need to take the services down...I think.... I have 2 parity drives and 18 data disks totaling ~120TB in btrfs Shrink Process Move all data off of 3 data disks to other array disks Generate reports of all files on all data disks and save. In event of data loss, I'd at least know what was lost Offsite backups of all critical data Remove 3 empty data disks from array Unassign Parity 2 ?? This is my primary question -- if data disk fails during parity rebuild on parity1, can parity 2 be swapped back in with the original 3 data disks and new config with same config as before, check "parity is valid", rebuild failed data disk, get stable, restart process. Does this work? New Config Rebuild Parity only on Parity 1 disk Add parity 2 back, rebuild parity on parity 2 Remaining risks If parity1 disk fails during parity 2 rebuild, I would be left without a parity for a bit until parity 2 rebuild finishes Mitigation: Smart reports prior to rebuilds to minimize risk. Would an extended self test prior help or is SMART sufficient? Mitigation: Parity drives are NAS drives that should have a very low fail rate
June 15, 20242 yr Solution 1 hour ago, geeksheikh said: ?? This is my primary question -- if data disk fails during parity rebuild on parity1, can parity 2 be swapped back in with the original 3 data disks and new config with same config as before, check "parity is valid", rebuild failed data disk, get stable, restart process. Does this work? Yes, but only if you do the parity sync in maintenance mode.
June 15, 20242 yr Author great! Thanks for that clarification. That would have been a bad check box to miss. The rest of the process looks like best option overall given that I don't want to zero all the drives first?
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